CLEVELAND, OH – Dr. Joan Marie Duwve has real world medical experience compared to none for ex-Ohio director of health Dr. Amy Stearns-Acton. 11 years in family practice. She’s an educator. Grant manager. Not a big one. $58,848. She’s helped write policies and a law in the state of Indiana while Vice President Michael Pence served as the state’s governor.
Duwve joined South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster’s administration on April 17, 2020 and was announced as Governor Richard Michael DeWine’s health director on September 10, 2020 until she withdrew. “Personal reasons.”
The April 17 job was not the “director’s job for the South Carolina Department of Health and Environment Control organized under that state’s laws. Duwve worked from April until June under Rick Toomey. She was the director of “public health.” He was the board-appointed and South Carolina senate-confirmed South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (SCDHC). When Toomey resigned, W. Marshall Taylor became Duwve’s interim boss. His name is the one saying they wish Duwve well in Ohio; and now “what the fuck?”
South Carolina’s Code of Laws is the equivalent to the Revised Code of Ohio and that state’s health laws are found in Title 44. The difference in volume is profound. The word “pandemic” is mentioned in only four times South Carolina health statutes compared to Ohio’s 26.
What South Carolina’s legislature did in Section 44-4-540, one law, is identify 27 specific and restrictive instructions for state officials to follow. The mask and social distancing bullshit isn’t in its state laws like the words don’t exist in Ohio’s. South Carolina officials got caught up in the Amy Acton Ohio has 117,000 CoVid 19 infected scare just like every other sucker in the world who didn’t know the real number was 13.
Nine of the 13 known infected were Russian American Jews from Cuyahoga County, according to Cuyahoga County health director Terry Allan. He obtained his information from the Cleveland Jewish Federation operated by the area’s Russian American community.
Three of the Russian Americans from Cuyahoga County had traveled from Soviet Israel where they’d visited their Russian or Soviet “dual” countrymen. Six attended the Russian-controlled American Israeli Public Affairs Committee conference in March 2020 where they were physically around Russian Israelis who had been exposed to camels.
The World Health Organization identified this year’s zoonotic virus as a Middle East Respiratory Syndrome gift from camels in December as being imported into the U.S. to the states of New York, Florida, New Jersey, Texas, California and Oregon. The virus was also transmitted, according to the WHO, to the Wuhan Province in China.
The sources of the virus are Israel, India, Egypt, Pakistan and parts of Africa where camels exist; and where at least 40 percent of this nation’s health care workers are from as the nation’s universities are educating 1.1 million aliens instead of natural born U.S. citizens annually in those professions. Foreign health care workers were quite literally infecting the Americans who’d never traveled to those nations with their viruses.
The differences in authority and instructions to each state’s health directors during a pandemic are also profound. Where Ohio instructed its health directors to quarantine the infected, placard their homes, financially maintain the quarantined in their homes, and to post a guard to keep the disobedient at home; no such specific instructions exist in South Carolina’s code.
The difference in Duwve’s involvement in South Carolina’s pandemic response and the authority she had under a board’s oversight the governor influenced but did not control is night and day. She was not McMaster’s “Amy Acton.” She also didn’t go off on that “The Force” bullshit Acton named a team of researchers in honor of her being a Star Wars fan. McMaster’s also didn’t close his state’s economy.
The concern for Ohioans, which should have been one Duwve considered, has been that DeWine and his last health director did not discharge only the duties of the elected and appointed public offices they held; and recklessly failed to obey any of the state’s 26 pandemic laws in the manner spelled out by law.
Any image-conscious person jumping into a highly-visible statewide job would conduct an extensive keyword search to see how the media treated their predecessor. Duwve probably, and correctly sensed she’d be walking into a reputation-killing political war.
Members of DeWine’s Republican party, led by State Rep. John Becker, have been his most correctly-vocal critics. I’ve read where more than three dozen civil claims have been filed against DeWine. The owners of the Kalahari theme park identify him as “the enemy of the people.” The U.S. Department of Justice has joined with at least two lawmakers filing charges that governors in Illinois and Hawaii exceeded the authority of the elected offices they held.
Criminal charges such as dereliction of duty pursuant to R.C. 2921.44 (E) are being considered by some Ohio citizens to be filed against DeWine. His reckless dereliction went further as his unconstitutional violation of the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause in Article 1, Section 8 that affected businesses only Congress had the authority to regulate. Doing so has most assuredly created state budget deficits in every category of Ohio’s operating budget and wiped out reserves. That violates Section 2921.44(D) of the state’s dereliction of duty law.
There are 88 health directors operating under this state’s laws, and who were already administered oaths of office to discharge the duties identified in Title 37 during the current pandemic. They’re familiar or should be with all the orders the state’s health directors have issued. They know the discussion “this state’s” been having about the nuances of how the pandemic, here, was handled by the current governor’s administration. They know the mood of Ohioans as current residents of the state.
This is where DeWine’s decision to go outside the state’s current knowledge pool of already qualified health officials shows his curve-graded lack of mental capacity to discharge the duties of the office of governor instead of his own whims. Stearns-Acton answered “yes” to a question on her Ohio Medical Board application that she’d been treated for a mental illness or disorder. She was weak and usable.
No health director, under this state’s laws, is under a maliciously-manipulative governor’s control. A health director once administered an oath to discharge the office’s duties should be able to disregard a governor’s political desires so that only the duties of the office are discharged in the manner written into a state’s laws.
Nearly 12 million lives have been disrupted because of DeWine’s personal ignorance. Yes. Ignorance. He doesn’t think or write for himself. He’s a lawyer who let his license lapse. His only career has been in winning campaigns for elected office. His service once elected has been historically horrible.
The General Assembly of Ohio should put all partisan and personal differences aside to hold this jackass criminally and civily liable for his reckless, duty-exceeding lie that 100,000 Ohioans were CoVid 19 infected when he knew the truth was only 9. They should also strip the governor of the authority of appointing the director of health and look to South Carolina’s code, as well as others that are similar, for guidance.
Duwve won’t have a problem finding another job. From a pure career-saving perspective avoiding DeWine’s wreck of an administration is a good decision.
[FOOTNOTE: My Catawba, South Carolina-born Grandmother Helen Pride-Brewer’s brother, Dr. Hemphill Pride, Sr., was South Carolina’s first American Negro dentist. His namesake son served in the South Carolina Senate.]